White laboratory coats, traditionally thought of as a sign of authority and competence, are a necessary part of the lives of some scientists - but not all. Indeed, as the latest stories on female Lego scientists have emerged, I am delighted to find that two of the three have escaped the stereotyping and are not wearing lab coats – only the chemist has donned the snowy gown and, to my mind at least, rightly so.

I am a scientist, and have been for several years now, but I have never had cause to wear a lab coat for my work. I imagine lab coats to be reserved for those scientists handling particular materials like chemicals or biological materials, for example. True, sometimes psychologists need to handle these materials, but my personal research has never called for them, instead being based in behavioural experimentation.

This brings me to the problem I face when invited to speak at Soapbox Science, an annual science communication event for women in academia. This year it takes place in several locations around the UK, and I am one of 12 scientists fortunate enough to be chosen to talk about my research at Bristol’s Harbourside Festival of Nature on June 14th.

The essence of Soapbox Science is much the same as Speaker’s Corner in London: to take a public area and turn it into an arena designed to bring science directly to passers-by. The key point is that you do this without the aid of slideshows and exciting paraphernalia. It is also a celebration of the diversity of scientists, bringing together female academics from varied fields in the hope of inspiring young women (and men) to consider a career in the sciences.

A traditional part of the event is that participating scientists stand on their soapbox clad in a white laboratory coat; however, I will not be wearing a lab coat during my time on the soapbox. I have no problem with this in principle, but since I have never had cause to wear one in the course of my research to me wearing one would feel a lie. I suppose you could say I could wear one anyway for the sake of tradition of the event, or perhaps because it’s a recognisable stereotype that will identify me to the crowd. But there is a very important reason that I and most other psychologists don't wear one, ever. I vividly remember the undergraduate lecture where I first heard the story of psychologist Stanley Milgram, and of the serious implication that lab coats produce a particular environmental effect that is less than ideal for psychological experiments.

In 1961 Milgram, then a psychologist at Yale University, began a series of experiments designed to measure obedience and conformity. In the wake of the Second World War he wanted to understand the behaviours and social influences associated with committing harmful acts at the behest of an authority figure. His experiments included an “impassive...and somewhat stern” male scientist, wearing what was described as a “grey technicians coat”, instructing volunteers to electrocute their test partners with a lethal electrical charge if they got a question wrong.

The ‘test partner’ was in fact a confederate actor feigning pain – but by the test end 65% of volunteers had effectively killed the stranger. Interestingly, when Milgram polled psychology students and professors prior to the experiment they believed only a very small number of volunteers, between 1 and 3%, would be prepared to inflict the lethal punishment asked of them.

What’s important here is that Milgram’s authority figure was a stern male scientist in a laboratory coat – a stereotypical image most of us are familiar with. A study from Leicester University in 2000 demonstrated that of 1200 primary school children asked to draw a scientist the majority drew a white man with facial or eccentric hair wearing a white jacket. Almost 15 years later in our own outreach work at the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol little has changed. Of over 1000 school children asked to draw a scientist most drew a spectacled man in a lab coat, and just one drew a woman (in a lab coat, of course).

All of this paints an interesting picture of our perception of the stereotypical scientist. Not only do we imagine the authority of a scientist is so great that we would kill another human being at their request, but we succumb to this authority far more often than we would estimate. Milgram taught us how extreme the effects of authority can be on the way we think and behave – even while we do not suspect the effects of a white lab coat. This shaped the world of psychological experimentation, and still stands today as I work with my human participants lab-coat-free.

I am pretty confident that I am not the only one at the moment who believes that it is high time for breaking down the barriers to a scientific career, whether that barrier be gender or the clichéd archetype of a serious scientist. This Saturday I will stand on a soapbox as a scientist, as a woman, having never donned a lab coat, determined to show every person that comes within earshot that anyone can be a scientist.